


Crowns for Kings and Queens

by baar_ur



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Aerys Is His Own Warning, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2019-07-28 04:03:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16233830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baar_ur/pseuds/baar_ur
Summary: Thirteen brides for Rhaegar Targaryen. Thirteen ways the song of ice and fire could have been sung. Thirteen crowns for kings and queens.





	1. Amaryllis, Geranium, Dahlia

On the last night of the tourney celebrating Prince Viserys’ birth, Cersei’s father stands at the head of the great table beside the king and raises a glass to toast his daughter’s betrothal to Prince Rhaegar. She thinks she might die of happiness, especially when the prince smiles at her from his father’s side and raises his glass to her.

She is four-and-ten when they wed in the Sept of Baelor, and he one-and-twenty. Her jewels are new, part of her dower, all a-tumble with golden lions and dragons, and her wedding gown is silk, Lannister crimson and Targaryen red. The prince -  _ her _ prince - wraps his cloak around her shoulders and kisses her lips and she thinks she might die of happiness. She knows without looking that Father is as close to smiling as he ever is. His little lioness is fulfilling her destiny. She  _ will _ be queen.

The wedding feast is five-and-thirty courses, for each of their years, and every plate on the high table is solid gold. Queen Rhaella is all soft, sad smiles as Cersei bubbles with excitement for the bedding. It has been years upon years since she touched Jamie, and she is beginning to forget it ever happened. Her twin is happy for her, but there is a sadness in him as well tonight. Ever they have belonged to each other. Now she belongs to Prince Rhaegar, just as Rhaegar belongs to her.

Lord Marbrand is the one to call for the bedding, and Cersei will never know it came at a nudge from her father. She never noticed the tumblers and their kites, playing out the Battle Above the Gods’ Eye as the king’s mood turned sour. Cersei is carried up to her husband’s bedchamber. She never sees the mummers tied to a stake in one of the Red Keep’s courtyards with jars of wildfire piled at their feet. Rhaegar takes her maidenhead oh so gently, and she thinks she might die of happiness. She does not see the look in the king’s eye as green flames lick at the flesh of the innocent. 

She will see it, soon enough. But not that night.

Only ten moons later, she brings a daughter into the world. There is so much blood and pain, but when she sees Rhaegar smile down at their child and name her Rhaenys, Cersei thinks she might die of happiness. Rhaenys has her father’s eyes and silver-gold hair, like the electrum that is sometimes brought up from lesser mines than the Rock. She is a fat and happy babe, and Cersei wonders if her lady mother loved her and Jamie as much as she loves Rhaenys.

King Aerys does not smile when they formally present their babe to him; he asks if the child has the same habit of shitting gold as her grandfather. Cersei tries to laugh away the insult, but she cries on Rhaella’s shoulder that night. She  _ knows _ the king called her father a servant, but did he not consent to wed Rhaegar to her? She  _ knows _ her daughter is not a boy, but can he not see that she is young and can bear another child soon?

Cersei nurses her daughter for only a few weeks, only as long as it takes before the maester says it is safe to lay with her husband once more. Her breasts hurt for a time, but it hurts more to see Rhaenys in the arms of a wet-nurse. Her daughter deserves the milk of a lioness, to grow strong and tall into a dragoness worthy of her name. But Cersei must, she  _ must _ give Rhaegar a son.

During a break in the winter storms, they go away to Dragonstone together. She does not like the ancient keep, cold and damp and beset by ill weather as it is. But it is quiet, and they have a respite from the king’s jibes and her father’s stony pride. Every night, they lay together, and every night, Rhaegar plays his harp and sings for her. It is just as she dreamed when she was a little girl. On one rare, clear night, they watch a single star fall into the sea while his seed is still warm inside her. He tells her this child will be a boy, and he tells her true.

When Aegon is born, the bells of King’s Landing ring from dawn to sunset. Cersei thinks she might die of happiness. Never has her heart been so full of love and joy and pride as when her tiny son lays his silver-white head on her breast. She has given her prince a son; she has given the man who will be king a boy who will be prince; she has given the kingdoms a babe who will be king. While she rests, half-sleeping with Aegon in his cradle beside her bed, she thinks her father enters and kisses her brow and tells her that he is proud of her. She never knows if it was real or a dream.

There is a tourney in the sixth moon after Aegon’s birth. Cersei wears rich brocades and silks and the necklace that Rhaegar gave her in her last moon of pregnancy: beads of gold and coral and jet, and between her breasts, a medallion of dragonglass carved with a relief of the Targaryen sigil. When she stands in the royal box, the crowds scream for her, louder than they did for the king or for Rhaegar. She has only to raise a hand to silence them and announce the start of the tourney.  _ That _ is power.  _ That _ is pride. 

Rhaegar and Jamie work their way up the lists and meet in the last joust; after seven broken lances, Rhaegar concedes the match, and it is Jamie who grants her the crown of red amaryllis, crimson geranium, and golden dahlias, the flowers of the Westerlands. There is a spark when their eyes meet, but it is the last gasp of something long-abandoned and now dying.

When her little Egg begins to learn to walk, Rhaegar returns to her bed by unspoken agreement. They have a heir, Cersei thinks, but there must be another boy. The throne demands a spare. When she begins to swell again, Cersei finds herself, for the first time, afraid. It was her mother’s third child that killed her, that was born a wretched monster and a mockery of their house. She wakes shaking and sweating in the night from dreams of birthing a terrible creature, dreams of the king accusing her of conceiving a bastard, dreams of being led to the block while Rhaegar holds Rhaenys and Aegon and shakes his head sadly. She is only eight-and-ten.

Then the queen begins to grow with child as well, and Cersei finds her strength. Rhaella grows thinner rather than fatter, the lines around her mouth deepening even as she is pardoned from the king’s attentions. Their two little courts merge into one, Cersei’s many young ladies and Rhaella’s few matronly friends sharing the queen’s larger solar. Cersei spends her days trying to tempt her goodmother into eating, while Rhaegar does his best to do his father’s work. The realm needs a young king, Cersei thinks as she finds scars on Rhaella’s back and breasts. Rhaella belongs to the lioness’s pride now.

Cersei brings twin boys into the world. She names one Jaehaerys, and Rhaella names the other Aemon. Rhaella births a single girl with great difficulty, and weeps with joy to see her thrive. Rhaegar is the one to name his sister Daenerys. 

Aerys cuts himself on the Iron Throne the day the children are presented to him. What a coincidence, that her father had sent servants to clean and polish the throne only the day before. The cut festers, and illness eats away at his flesh. He refuses to see the grand maester. In agony, he thrusts his hand into the fireplace to try and burn out the infection. Instead he dies only a few days later.

Rhaegar’s crown is the simple gold band that was wrought for Aegon III, and the High Septon places it on his head under a beam of rainbow light in the Sept of Baelor. Cersei’s crown is made for her, all of spun gold and emeralds, and she kneels for Rhaegar to place it on her head. It is the culmination of her dreams, the fulfilment of her ambitions. Oh, how she has waited and longed for this! Oh, how the city cries out for them! Oh, now,  _ now _ , she will die of happiness!

That night, Rhaegar finds her in his bed wearing nothing but that crown. He desires another daughter, and anything Rhaegar desires, Cersei will give him, now that he has given her all that she desires. Why another daughter, she does not know. It has something to do with a song, but she has never listened to the words of his songs, preferring to enjoy the sound of his voice. He wants a daughter, and Cersei will give him one.

And she does. She has been queen for nine moons, the happiest time of her life, when she comes to the birthing bed early. She has not feared for the pregnancy, but now she wonders if she should have. Rhaella is the one to place her daughter in her arms, with the tuft of hair on her head stained red-gold with blood. Cersei names her Myrcella, for the wife of the first Andal King of the Rock.

Cersei does not die of happiness. She dies of blood loss, while her daughter mewls at her breast and Lannister crimson drips into pools on the floor. She has been queen for nine moons, the happiest time of her life, and not yet seen her twentieth nameday.

Rhaegar never wears any color but black from that day. As little as he had understood his wife, he had loved her in his way. As little as she had understood him, she had loved him in her way. She is buried beneath the Sept of Baelor in her wedding finery, crimson silk and lion gold beneath a black shroud.

Rhaenys grows up tall and strong, just as her mother wished, and perhaps more like her mother than her father would have wished. She is as sweet and gentle as any septa could desire their charge to be, and yet her grandmother despairs to see Aerys in Rhaenys’ eyes. She is the Light of the East, just as her mother was the Light of the West. Men and women alike would kill for her favor. She knows it, and she uses it.

Aegon is everything his father knew he would be. Men see the strength of Aegon the Conqueror in him, and women the kindness of Aegon the Unlikely. What man could have asked for a better son? What king could have asked for a better heir? And yet when dragons hatch and winter falls and magic returns to the world, it is Aegon who will perish beyond the veil of light at the end of the world.

How little time Cersei had with her twins, and how she would have loved them. Rhaegar calls them his little dreamers, and they seem almost able to understand each other without speaking. Aemon and Jaehaerys are as close to each other as their mother was to her twin, closer even with the Targaryen blood in their veins. They both see more than eyes alone can see, hear more than ears alone can hear. One of them takes the place of their many-times-great-uncle as the Raven, and one of them takes the place of their brother as the King. 

And Myrcella - her name was her mother’s dying wish, and even the weight of prophecy could not move Rhaegar to change it. She is always a little small, born early as she was. How she loves her little uncle, much to her grandfather’s chagrin. Between her father’s love of ancient tales and her uncle’s hunger for knowledge, what hope was there that she would ever be anything but a bookworm? After the winter, after the war, she is the one to write the chronicle of Aegon and Daenerys and Tyrion. In time, it will become legend. In time, it will become myth. In time, it will be forgotten. Then the winter will come again.

And as for the dragons that hatched on Rhaegar’s funeral pyre, the year the winter came: their names were iron and silver and gold.

 


	2. Pomegranate, Bougainvillea, Starflower

It is the year before the False Spring when Prince Rhaegar comes to Dorne to finalize his betrothal to Princess Elia Nymeros Martell, and yet Ashara Dayne is the woman he asks to marry him. 

At first, she thinks he is asking in theory only. There is an unexpected heat wave in Sunspear, and the parties of Princess Loreza and Prince Rhaegar have both decamped to the Water Gardens to continue negotiations. When the prince, pink and peeling with sunburn, tells her that he truly is asking for her hand, she thinks he is joking. He insists he is serious. She insists on speaking to Elia.

Ashara expected her princess to be angry, to take it as a sign of Targaryen madness or of a duplicitous and unfaithful temperament just like the king. Instead, Elia is relieved. Their marriage would never have been loving, would never have been safe from Tywin Lannister, and Elia is too old for the Prince, too frail to go to King’s Landing. All this she says, and Ashara thinks about the letters from Baelor Hightower locked in one of the little drawers of Elia’s writing desk.

They are betrothed for two weeks, long enough for the heat wave in Sunspear to break. They marry in the family chapel of the Sandship. Arthur gives her away, and Rhaegar’s cloak is the same he uses every day. She wears a crown of pomegranate flowers, blousy red petals bright against her dark hair. When Rhaegar kisses her, Ashara realizes she may never see Dorne again once they leave for the capital.

Six months pass before they board a ship. Rhaegar seems neither pleased nor troubled by his time in exile from his father’s good graces. He is so hard for Ashara to read; she is too used to Elia’s free laughter, Oberyn’s wild grins and grimaces, Doran’s tapping fingers and Princess Loreza’s expressive eyes. Looking at Rhaegar is like looking through milkglass. She never knows if what she sees is what he feels, or only a reflection of what she thinks.

When Rhaegar presents Ashara to his parents in the great throne room of the Red Keep, the swell of her pregnancy is only just visible. The king has few words for her, but the queen is quick to scoop her up and bring her into the fold of her ladies. Queen Rhaella is so lonely, somedays alone with only Viserys and Ashara. Those are the days Ashara likes best, though, when the queen sews baby clothes with dragons and shooting stars and Ashara sits on the floor to teach Viserys Dornish children’s games.

Less than half a year passes before Ashara goes to the birthing bed. Her son is small, but so beautiful, with his father’s silver hair and her own dark violet eyes. Oh, but he will break hearts one day. Rhaegar kisses the pulse-point on his son’s head and calls him Aegon, and the prince that was promised. Little Aegon coughs in his sleep and grizzles when he is fed, and King Aerys looks down his nose at his grandson and tells Ashara she’d best get to bearing a  _ healthy _ boy, for this one is sure to die.

Rhaegar hosts a tourney for his son’s birth, paying from his own purses as King Aerys refuses to celebrate such a sickly boy. The Princess of Dorne comes in full state with all her children, and Elia coos over Aegon while Ashara holds the newest little Hightower, Olyvar. There is an archery contest, which Elia wins, and a melee, which Oberyn almost wins. There is a joust, of course, and with Rhaegar in the royal box beside her, it is Ashara’s brother who wins. He rides toward her with the crown of pomegranate blossoms and deep purple bougainvillea, speckled with the white starflowers that bloom along the Torentine. But Ashara gives him the smallest shake of her head and the crown goes instead to Queen Rhaella. The flowers lend color to her cheeks and bring out the soft lilac of her eyes, and Ashara thinks she has never seen her goodmother so happy.

Ashara bears another boy in a year’s turn, as Aerys said she should, but Aegon lives. He grows, though it might be a stretch to say he thrives, as though he desires to thwart his grandfather just like Ashara tells him he should every time she puts him in his cradle to sleep. He will always be slender like his father, a man fashioned from willow rather than oak like Arthur, but he grows to be a man nonetheless. His brother Aemon will be as tall and as strong as his Ser Uncle, and a rival for Sword of the Morning until he and Edric duel for the right to the title. Edric wins, and there is ever after a little sadness in Aemon when he wields a weapon that is not Dawn.

In another year’s turn, Ashara bears a girl, and she and Rhaegar have their first and only great fight. While she still sleeps in the birthing bed, he names the child Rhaenys. Ashara screams at him - Rhaenys, for a child of Dorne? What mockery worthy of King Aerys! - and Rhaegar only grows quieter as he grows angrier, until he leaves her chambers, leaves King’s Landing, leaves Westeros entirely to complete a trade agreement with the Archon of Tyrosh. Aerys laughs at her, and Rhaella has only sad smiles and unconvincing platitudes to offer, and Ashara is beginning to contemplate the high towers of the Red Keep and the distance to the sea below before Rhaegar returns.

Ashara calls the child Rhae, and it is a compromise. Rhaegar promises if he leaves King’s Landing again while his father lives, that she will come with him, and it is an apology. That is what married life is like, Rhaella whispers to her one night, but Ashara has heard her goodmother weep in the night and wonders what apology Aerys has ever given.

He dies before Ashara has to ponder it long. Queen Rhaella brings a little girl into the world as a storm rages about the Red Keep, and King Aerys dances on his balcony in delight. In the rain, he slips and falls onto the spikes of Maegor’s cruel moat below. If Arthur attended the king that night, it is not what the duty roster says, and yet the Queen names her daughter Daenerys with a kiss to Ashara’s cheek.

The crown the High Septon places on Rhaegar’s head is a replica of Jaehaerys the Wise’s crown, seven gems set in gold: ruby and amber, citrine and emerald, sapphire and amethyst, with a great white diamond above his brow. Ashara’s crown is lighter and simpler, silver with amethysts and moonstones and tiny diamonds that sparkle like dew on the grass. After the blessing and the feast and the unending toasts, they retire to their chambers and let their children see the crowns that may one day be theirs. Rhaegar’s crown slides down over Aegon’s head easily, and they all laugh at the sight of him wearing it as a necklace while Rhae tests the smooth silver of Ashara’s circlet with her gums.

Before the anniversary of the coronation arrives, Ashara gives her husband the second daughter his song desires. Rhaegar offers her the chance to name the girl, but the child is already hearty and energetic. She is a Visenya if Ashara has ever seen one, despite her eyes as white as the moonstones in her mother’s crown. How beautiful she grows, as she learns to walk with someone at her side, then guided by the pure white hunting hound that Rhae trains for her. She never misses a step after that, and if sometimes she knows things she could not have seen, then she must have heard them.

Ashara was wrong, though: it is Rhae who is the wild one, and Visenya who is courtly. Rhae is only six when her father rides out to put down the Greyjoy Rebellion, and has to be returned to the Red Keep by a party of riders after being discovered stowing away in a supply wagon. Rhae is the one who hunts and hawks and rides like the west wind across the desert; Visenya is the one who sits court with her grandmother, who coos over babies and has half a hundred suitors begging for her hand by the time she is three-and-ten.

Visenya is not the only one besieged with offers of betrothals; from the moment they become men, Aegon and Aemon are the most eligible bachelors in the realm. The final years of summer see the court at King’s Landing filled with lovely young ladies and their ambitious parents. In the end, Ashara knows her sons’ choices before they do. Aegon begs his father’s permission to wed Margaery Tyrell; her sweetness well matches his, and when he is king, her ambition will make up for his bookishness. Aemon has never begged - instead he threatens to run away with Joanna Lannister if they cannot marry. Jamie Lannister’s daughter and Lyanna Stark’s, the girl is as bold as Aemon is, her speed and agility a good match for him on the sparring field just as her kindness and compassion are for him in marriage.

It is only a year after her boys are wed that winter comes. Rhaegar dies in his sleep, in bed beside his queen, and she weeps over his body for hours before her brother picks her up and carries her away. At his funeral pyre, his most precious possessions are laid beside him: the books and scrolls he translated himself, the sword he wielded since he was a squire, and the three dragon eggs he found in the rubble of Summerhall.

Rhae will be the one, Ashara’s precious firstborn daughter, to fly beyond the end of the world and break the heart of winter, never to return. Visenya will take the throne of weirwood as the Raven, and Aegon will take the throne of iron as the King. Aemon will remain at the ruins of the Wall, as his great-grandfather’s brother did, and hide his histories where they will only be found in direst need.

It is dawn, the day after Rhaegar’s death, when the flames die down and the cracking of eggshells can be heard. It is dawn when the cries of dragons fill the air once more. And the names of those dragons were dawn and dusk and midnight.


	3. Heather, Gorse, Bluebell

Gwynesse knows the rumors of what led to her betrothal: that the king delighted in what irritated his Hand, that Lord Tywin offered his daughter in marriage to the Prince one too many times, and that the King sought out a betrothal that would insult Lord Lannister as much as possible. That is how the goodsister of Balon Greyjoy came to stand in the Sept of Baelor with Rhaegar Targaryen’s wedding cloak about her shoulders. Gwynesse Harlaw knows she is not the loveliest girl the prince could have married, nor the sweetest or the kindest, but she is willing to bet that she is the most cunning.

She will give him sons. She will make him love her.

At the wedding feast, the first course is squid. It does not trouble her; she has no great love of her sister’s husband nor of his sigil, and she has grown up on the bounty of the sea. She has to show her new-made husband how to eat the dish, and as he struggles to pin down the slippery forkful, she gives up and feeds him from her own plate. Rhaegar blushes, and abruptly she is reminded that he is six-and-ten, only a year older than her, for all that he is a knight and a prince.

The morning after the bedding, the king asks if she was cold and slick as a fish. The prince looks at his father with hard eyes of dark indigo and replies that he does not appreciate the insult to his wife, even as the king growls that it was a jape. Perhaps it will not be so hard to make him love her after all.

The queen is so much like Alannys that some days, Gwyn wants to treat her just like her sister, to shake her and order her to stand up for herself. She sees the bruises on Rhaella’s wrists and the scabs on her shoulders, and she  _ longs _ to teach her goodmother how to hold a seax and how to break a man’s fingers. But Rhaella is too gentle; even when Gwyn tries to show her how to break a man’s hold, she cringes and flinches. After a while, she gives up. She carves a little wriggling dragon on the wooden handle of the knife she hides in the boning of her corset and tells herself that if and when the time comes, she will use it. Not for herself, but for Rhaella.

She cannot wear that corset for long, though. It is only a few moons before she begins to swell, and her goodmother follows suit only a moon later. Gwyn’s birthing and Rhaella’s could not be more different. Gwyn’s son Aegon comes in the hour of the wolf while a storm worthy of the Iron Islands howls outside; Viserys is born a fortnight later, on a clear and sunny day. Just as their births were unalike, so are their children: Aegon is a happy babe, where Viserys cries without cease.

There is a tourney for the birth of the boys, though Gwyn thinks it is mostly a silly mess of greenlanders hitting each other for fun. King Aerys drinks too much and asks if Aegon was born in a fish’s egg, while Queen Rhaella struggles to feed Viserys under a shawl until at last Gwyn takes the boy from her and nurses him at her own breast. She’s happy to let the king feel titillated if it quiets the poor child. So it is that Rhaegar crowns her with heather and gorse and bluebells as Queen of Love and Beauty with one breast bare and her head raised high. She is ready to weather the whispers of the smallfolk that she looked a slut or a whore; instead her handmaids tell her that a septon wept and called her a vision of the Mother, that women praise her sense and kindness, that men say she is as strong and good a woman as they would ever have as queen. Whether it is true or not, she does not care. She hangs her wreath beneath the canopy of her bed until it dries, then she packs it away to look on when she feels weak or shamed.

She is seven moons heavy with her second child when Duskendale takes King Aerys. How she wishes then that Darklyn would have killed him, and how she wishes it for years after. He returns whole in body and broken in mind, and all the royal family must weather the effects of his madness.

Her second is a boy, and she calls him Baelor to quiet the septons who call her a heathen. She loves the Drowned God, aye, and hates the Storm God as she was taught to at her mother’s knee. She is ironborn. She brought no drowned man with her to King’s Landing, though she could have, and she gives her children to the Drowned God herself without ceremony. If naming a child for a fool is enough to make a septon think she respects their weakling Seven, she would call the boy Florian if she had to.

Her third comes in another year’s turn, scarce days after her eighteenth nameday, and she calls him Jaehaerys at Rhaella’s suggestion. Rhaegar has not cared to name any babe after his first, but Gwyn cares little and less. He’ll take an interest in them once they learn to read, she supposes, or once they can hold a toy sword in something other than a clumsy fist.

With his father’s madness growing, responsibilities fall upon Rhaegar. He spends hours closeted with the Small Council now, doing the work that his father cannot. With the Small Council comes Tywin Lannister, and with Tywin Lannister comes Cersei Lannister. By the time Aerys begins to burn men alive with wildfire, Cersei Lannister is a lithe and lean four-and-ten, all golden hair and milk-white skin. Gwynesse has just seen her twentieth nameday and the birth of her fourth son, Maekar. Aegon has her flaxen hair, Baelor her hazel eyes, and Jaehaerys her suntanned skin. She brings Rhaegar to her bed as soon as it is safe for her to do so, and asks if he would prefer a lioness to a rock wife. He asks her in return why he would prefer soft gold to a princess of stone and salt.

She had hoped that Rhaegar would give her another son that night, but the False Spring comes and goes before she quickens again. At the birth of their fifth son, little Aemon, King Aerys takes ship for Dragonstone. He professes himself sick to death of the city bells ringing and ringing for the birth of yet another boy. Gwynesse thinks it more likely he is sick to death of jealousy. Perhaps if he’d had enough sense to defy his father and marry another than his sister, he’d have as many sons as his son does now.

Aerys returns with the new year, bringing fire and petty rage and a cough that does not cease. The damp of Dragonstone has done his health no good, when it is already weak from his madness. Every day he grows thinner and paler and weaker. He lives long enough to give Rhaella one last child, and dies before the babe is born. The night of his funeral pyre, Gwynesse opens the cedar box she keeps beside her bed and smiles down at the crown of love and beauty that Rhaegar gave her, now eight years past.

Rhaegar’s crown is dragonbone and gold, three great curving teeth taken from the skull of Balerion the Dread and linked with golden bands. He stands before the High Septon and takes it from the man’s hands to place it on his own head. Then he gives Gwynesse her crown, to place it herself: a golden circlet that shines against her flaxen hair, graven with dragons of sky and sea. She is eight moons pregnant with their sixth child, and the crowds cheer her even as she needs Rhaegar’s hand to make it down the steps safely. 

Daeron is their last, and as he did only for their first, Rhaegar names him. He slips into bed with her with the boy only a week old and sleeping in his arms, and teases that he had hoped for daughters, too. Gwyn just kisses him to shut him up. Now that he is king, he should have less time for his sons, yet it seems he has more. Aegon - she could never suffer to hear him called Egg - is nine now, and Rhaegar bestows upon the boy his first true sword. Baelor lives and breathes stories of the driftwood kings of the Iron Islands, and so Rhaegar is the one to give him his first sailing lesson. Jaehaerys is their brightest boy, only six and already reading in High Valyrian; his father solemnly places the key to his private library in his little hand, and from that day the boy wears it on a thin chain around his neck. Maekar is four and Aemon two, both too little to ask anything specific of Rhaegar, so he gifts them with toy knights and dragons, and bounces them on his knee when he sits at small judgements on the Iron Throne.

The nursery which she had kept filled for near a decade now begins to empty, and it seems some days as though Rhaella, now Queen Mother, might cry to see Daenerys and Daeron play at blocks together. Only when Gwyn pulls her down on the chaise beside her and wraps her in her arms does she say why: that Gwyn has given new life to House Targaryen when Rhaella could not, that so many times she had wished she had never been born so Aerys would have married another, that now she does not quite know what to do with herself. Rhaella’s fortieth name day is a scarce few months hence, and as the idea comes into Gwyn’s head, she realizes it will take more than a little effort to see it through.

She does see it through, though. She is ironborn, and her will is strong as steel; she is queen, and when she says something will be done, it is done. Cassana Baratheon and her husband are the first to arrive; something twinges in Gwyn’s chest when she looks out at their ship in the harbor, knowing they will take Baelor with them to foster when they leave. The ladies Velaryon, Penrose, and Tarth add to the party, as cousins of some degree. Elia Hightower, once Martell, brings her bouncing young lad with her, and he tusses with Maekar while she and Rhaella reminisce about her mother. Cersei Lannister arrives with her Marbrand betrothed in tow; even she has some softness in her heart, revealed when Rhaella takes her hands and tells her of Joanna, who died when the girl was scarcely older than Jaehaerys. Catelyn and Lysa Tully, Lyarra and Lyanna Stark, Ladies Royce and Waynwood and Corbray; all of them cheer when Rhaella’s nameday cake is brought out. It is not a dragon, but a phoenix, and beneath her wings are nine chicks.

Rhaegar kisses Gwynesse’s cheek and whispers his thanks. That is the memory she keeps tucked away for many years, just as she tucked away the first crown he gave her, as her boys grow and marry and start families of their own. That is the memory she keeps when the white raven flies from the Citadel, and the memory she keeps when she finds Rhaegar cold in his bed the following morning. That is the memory she keeps when her three eldest sons lay the dragon eggs their father gave them on his funeral pyre.

It is Baelor who will lead them, the strongest and the eldest. It is Daeron who will die, her sweetest boy, so eager to help. It is Daenerys who will be bound, weeping as her mother once wept, by limbs of weirwood. Jaehaerys will tell their stories in a dozen languages, and those tales will be told again and again even as the pages he wrote are stained by salt and smoke. 

The memory Gwynesse will keep for winter is the high hissing as those eggs hatched, the shadow of their wings against the smoke, the soft gasps of her children as the dragons chose their riders. And the names of those dragons were sea and stone and sorrow.


	4. Columbine, Anemone, Forget-me-not

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to be completely honest - I'm not very happy with this chapter, but I needed it out of the way before I could continue. Fun fact: the gender of all children (except in a few cases) was decided with a coin-flip, so both this chapter and the previous one were total chance.

Wynona Manderly might have been Lady of White Harbor, had she no brothers. Instead she has two, both young squires and both eager to beat the snot out of any lordling who might come to ask her hand. She has a fat father and a thin mother and a head of plain brown hair and no hope whatsoever of marrying Brandon Stark, nor any other high lord of the North. When the king comes to the North on progress, she does not even give herself to dream that some southron lordling would want to steal her away.

The Merman’s Hall is decorated as the court of the Merling King for the royal visit, table and chairs draped in velvet green as seaweed and all the candles behind blue-green glass. The prince dances with her at the feast, and it is as though they are at the bottom of the sea. His silver hair shines in the queer light, and his purple eyes are like nothing she’s ever seen. By the time the dance is over, Wynona is more than a little in love with him.

The next morning, after the royal retinue departs and she begins to discuss the event with her companions, she realizes every other girl in White Harbor feels the same.

It’s two moons before they return, and the whispers spread quickly: they have come back without the betrothal to young Lyanna Stark that everyone had expected. King Aerys and Lord Wyman spend a day and a night together in the lord’s solar. The next morning, the servants begin to decorate the sept in blue and green and purple and silver.

Rhaegar spars with Wylis and Wendel in the yard and takes Wynona for long rides on the stony beaches of the Bite. The king shares the high table with her family and delights them all with tales of Dorne and the Crownlands. The queen sails from King’s Landing in anticipation of the wedding, arriving with a pack of ladies and the hold of her ship laden with gifts.

Wynona Manderly marries Rhaegar Targaryen with pearls in her hair, and the people of White Harbor cheer for them when they appear on the battlements with his cloak about her shoulders. At the wedding feast, every bounty of the sea is laid out for all present to enjoy: salmon and swordfish, oysters and clams, shrimp and crabs, green loaves of bread rich in kelp flour and salads of watercress and curly dock. Queen Rhaella kisses her on both her cheeks and King Aerys embraces her tightly. Wynona is fifteen and Rhaegar is sixteen, and they spend the night exploring each other while the moon shines clear and bright through the windows of their suite.

After a sennight of feasting and festivities, the royal family sails for King’s Landing. It is there, ten moons later, that the Princess Rhaenys is born, with her mother’s dark hair and her father’s dark indigo eyes. Her uncle Prince Viserys follows her by only two moons, and the pair share everything, from the wetnurses Aerys so carefully chooses to toys sent from every corner of the realm.

For her sixteenth birthday, there is a tourney and gifts, both grander than any that she has seen before. Rhaella gives Wynona a coronet of pearls, one of the lesser crowns of Queen Betha, and teases her that there will be greater jewels when she is queen. Aerys gives her a sapphire ring and teases that there will be greater gifts when she bears a son. But the simple, lovely garland with which Rhaegar crowns her Queen of Love and Beauty outshines everything else, with purple columbines like amethysts and white anemone like diamonds and the blue of forget-me-not sparkling in between. Rhaegar gives her nothing else but a song, but it has always been his songs and his kisses that she loves best.

Wynona is six moons heavy with her second babe when Aerys travels to Duskendale to negotiate the town’s charter. Visenya is born in the third moon of his captivity. Rhaella kisses the girl’s downy white hair and calls her the perfect Targaryen princess, and together they both pray Aerys will live to meet the child.

He lives. He sees the child. He does not love her.

He does not make it so obvious - there is no spitting or cursing or insults. He takes the babe in his arms with some reluctance, examines her dispassionately, and makes a noise that is neither approving nor disapproving before he gives her back. Rhaegar kisses away Wynona’s tears and tells her that his song needs daughters as well as sons, that Aegon the Conqueror loves Rhaenys and Visenya both.

Rhaella joins her in the Red Keep’s sept morning and night to pray. The next must be a boy. The next must be Aegon. Wynona loses one pregnancy early, barely a few moons in. Then she loses another after almost five months, a little girl again. The maester comes down on her hard - no more riding, no more prayers in the cold winter sept, no more stresses. The next must be a boy. The next must be Aegon.

The next is Alysanne. She is the image of Jaehaerys’ queen, with her sea-blue eyes and golden hair, and yet Wynona weeps to hold her. Unlike her sisters, Rhaegar does not deign to name his daughter. Snow falls softly on King’s Landing the night she is born, and Aerys burns his first man in the morning. 

When the False Spring and the tourney at Harrenhal come, Wynona is carrying her fourth and too pregnant to travel. Little Daena is born while her father is away in the Riverlands, and the rumors are brought specially to the bed where Wynona nurses her daughter: Aerys traveled to the tourney to announce the betrothal of Rhaenys and Viserys, but changed his mind at the last minute; Hoster Tully offered to break his younger daughter’s engagement to Elbert Arryn if Rhaegar decided to set Wynona aside; Cersei Lannister tried to sneak into Rhaegar’s tent the night after her father resigned as Hand of the King.

The one story that is true, they try to keep from her. Wynona hears it nonetheless. It is on everyone’s lips - Lyanna Stark and the crown of winter roses. She is only glad she was not there to see it.

The night she learns Lyanna Stark has borne a son with eyes dark as indigo, she stands in her window in the moonlight. If only she had the strength to throw herself into the dry moat of Maegor’s Holdfast as Queen Helaena did after the Dance of the Dragons. But she is carrying one last chance for redemption. If only this one will be a boy. If only this one will be Aegon.

She cannot bring herself to name the girl she bears, and Rhaegar has no interest in such matters, so it falls to Queen Rhaella to call the child Aelinor. In eight years of marriage, she has borne five daughters, and now the maesters say she will bear no more. She travels to Dragonstone while Rhaegar remains at court, king in all but name.

It is only a moon later that little Jon Snow comes to join his father, and another moon before a copy of the royal writ making him legitimate is filed away in the Citadel. Queen Rhaella bears a little girl of her own, Daenerys, and the child spends her days in the royal nursery with a plethora of nieces to act as older sisters. Lyanna Stark marries Robert Baratheon as planned, though there are whispers that a hefty sum of gold from the royal treasury is involved to ensure everything goes smoothly.

Aerys fades away, the targets for his wrath growing fewer and fewer until he is content to have a brazier of wildfire burning eternally beside the Iron Throne. Then he simply fades out of existence, dead in his sleep.

Viserys and Rhaenys are betrothed at ten and married at thirteen. The girl is a steadying force on her uncle-husband, talking him down from his delusions and easily understanding his incoherent rants. Although he never raises a hand against his wife, Rhaella still sees the same hurt and weariness of her own marriage in Rhaenys’ eyes.

Sweet Visenya marries Renly Baratheon, with a hundred rumors why flying through the Red Keep - a love match, an apology for deflowering his older brother’s betrothed, a cover for each of them since she enjoys the company of women as he enjoys the company of men. Whatever the cause of the marriage, it is happy and childless, filled with music and dances and feasts as the couple attracts artists and artisans from both sides of the Narrow Sea.

In time, Wynona dies on Dragonstone, alone but for Alysanne, who never left her mother’s side. Only three moons later, Jon Targaryen marries his half-sister Aelinor. Only six moons later, the white raven flies from the Citadel, Rhaegar Targaryen passes into the realm beyond, and dragons are born from his funeral pyre. And the names of those dragons were rain and sun and snow.


	5. Iris, Rose, Violet

In his sixteenth year, newly knighted, Rhaegar Targaryen rides to Oldtown to find a book and finds a bride instead. 

Malora Hightower is nineteen, and those who love her call her  _ bookish _ rather than  _ obsessive. _ She has been able to read the Common Tongue since she was four, High Valyrian since she was eight, and the Old Tongue since she was twelve. When she was sixteen, the archmaesters voted to grant her one of the master keys to the Citadel, an honor neither her father nor her grandfather could claim. If she was permitted to sit the exams, she would already have a dozen links of her chain.

Those who mock her for her studies call her mad. She is not mad; she is angry. She is angry that pimple-faced boys are allowed to forge maester’s chains and she is not. She is angry that the dragons have died and magic has died with them. She is angry that when the acolytes see her reading and reading and reading, they laugh and steal her books away to intentionally misfile.

She is angry enough that when she sees a pale hand tracing the titles of her current reading pile, she snarls aloud. The words die in her throat half-spoken when she looks up to find Prince Rhaegar Targaryen as the culprit.

In the space of a single conversation, Malora Hightower discovers the first man that has ever respected her. Her father indulges her; her elder brother humors her; the archmaesters are amused by her. Rhaegar listens to her and believes her. Many of the books on dragons and Old Valyria she has read, he has read as well. She has half a dozen fragments of  _ Dragon, Wyrms, and Wyverns _ that he does not know, culled from quotations in other tomes. He has a copy of  _ Dragonkin _ by Maester Thomax, which she has never seen, in his private library. They speak until the sun sets, disturbed only when the servants come to light their candles.

They court for two weeks, walking the alleys of the Scribe’s Hearth and sitting in the yard of the Ravenry beneath the boughs of its weirwood tree. Then Rhaegar comes to her chambers in the evening and tells her to begin packing her books, for the wedding will be in King’s Landing. Malora Hightower will not be the first Hightower queen for a Targaryen king, and though it is not written in any scroll of prophecy, she doubts she will be the last.

She wears white samite and silver satin when they wed in the Sept of Baelor, her strawberry blonde hair brushed to shine like the flame at the top of the Hightower. Rhaegar kisses her when the septon pronounces them married, and Malora smiles as much because she loves him as because she has always dreamed of being a part of something magical.

And there is magic in King’s Landing, whether it comes from the skulls of the dragons or the eggs Rhaegar has recovered from the ruins of Summerhall. Fires burn brighter when she whispers the right words, if only for an instant. Trees come into bloom early when she asks them, if only by a day. There is magic left in the world, and her love has found it for her.

The family her love has brought her to is sweet as well. King Aerys is gregarious, generous, sharp-eyed and sharp-witted. Queen Rhaella could be the mother Malora never knew, for her own mother died bearing her brother Garth when Malora was only six. Her father’s second wife had been a good woman, but she had never been a replacement for Malora’s mother. Queen Rhaella never scolds her when she prefers reading to sewing, never complains if she brings a book to the supper table, never has anything but soft smiles and gentle words for her. She is a source of great comfort, too, for as Malora begins carrying her first pregnancy, Rhaella begins carrying her tenth.

Malora remembers precisely which page in which book to consult. The maester helps her prepare teas of raspberry leaf, nettle, and chamomile, and one of Rhaella’s ladies happily tucks the sachet of meadowsweet and motherwort under the queen’s pillow. Malora partakes of the remedies herself, but her prayers - and her spells - are for Rhaella.

When the queen delivers a healthy baby boy, it is thanks to Malora. When the princess delivers a beautiful little girl, it is a sure sign of the truth of Rhaegar’s prophecies. Aerys names the boy Viserys, and would have the girl called Aemma for the half-Targaryen Arryn that was the bride of Viserys I. Her name is to be Rhaenys, though, for their children will be the three heads of the dragon just as Aegon and his sisters were.

Soon there is a tourney, for the birth of the children and for the one-year anniversary of Rhaegar and Malora’s marriage. It is finer even than the tourneys at Highgarden and Oldtown, with knights from as far as Dorne and emissaries from Pentos and Tyrosh. The early rounds of jousting are a great mess of lesser knights and great lords, but before it is all halfway through, it’s clear Rhaegar’s skill will carry him to win. The crown of love and beauty he has for her is so lovely she could weep. White irises and white violets shine like the walls of the Hightower, providing a pure backdrop to the Targaryen-red roses.

Rhaegar returns to her bed once the nine-moon period Malora set as limitation has passed. He desires the heads of the dragon swiftly, that they will be grown by the time they are needed. Until he spends two years under the tutelage of the archmaester of medicine, however, Malora’s word on conception and childbirth is law.

So it is that Aegon is conceived under a hidden shadow, on the night that Aerys is captured in Duskendale but before a raven is sent to the Red Keep. In the morning, Rhaegar rides with Tywin Lannister to summon their forces and Malora pricks her finger on a thorn of a cut rose in her chambers. As her blood falls into the water of the vase, she prays Aerys will return to them. 

Blood magic is a fickle art. 

Malora is six moons pregnant with Aegon when Aerys is rescued, and the stairs of the Red Keep are a struggle for her, so she is not present to see him slap Rhaella when she steps forward to welcome him. She hears about it quickly enough, though, and how he spat at Rhaegar, claiming his heir had orchestrated the defiance of Duskendale to take the Iron Throne.

Rhaegar is too wrapped up in his prophecies to do such a thing, but Malora is not. The power of the spell comes from the blood of Aegon’s birth. With every scream, she commands the ghosts of every good Targaryen king to rid their family of the wretch that wears Aerys’ skin. Aegon the Conqueror, Jaehaerys the Good, Aegon the Dragonbane, Daeron the Good, Aegon the Unlikely - one of them or all of them answer her call. In the morning when the servants go to wake Aerys and tell him of his grandson, he is dead. Whispers say that he was pierced by a blade that did not touch his mattress, or by three blades, or by five, or that his eyes were open and his face frozen in horror. Lord Tywin comes down hard on the whisperers, and when Aerys lies in state there are no marks on his body, or at least none where his clothes do not cover him.

The same night, Queen Rhaella quietly bleeds with the two-moon-old babe Aerys had forced into her. She is almost glad not to bear another child of her brother’s, and it goes unmentioned. Only life can pay for death.

The coronation is delayed by a month, to allow lords to travel to the celebration and for Malora to recover from childbed so that she may be crowned with her husband. The sept shines with light and echoes with hymns on that day, as Rhaegar is crowned with a band of gold set with rubies and black diamonds and Malora with a crown almost identical, though hers is slimmer and set with white diamonds, in the colors of House Hightower.

There is peace under King Rhaegar; the roads are safe to travel and the winter is not too harsh to bear. Malora marvels at her children as they grow. They seem to carry the spirits of Aegon the Conqueror and his sisters, just as Rhaegar thought they might. Rhaenys is lively, perceptive and artistic, singing and dancing as finely as any princess, but the histories never said that she was a perfectionist, committed to doing everything well. Aegon is steadfast, chivalrous and sure to be the finest knight of his generation, and that he will keep any secret given to him by another until death is not something Malora ever read in any book. Both are the image of Valyria, their hair shining silver and their eyes violet, though Aegon’s eyes are as dark as his father’s and Rhaenys’ tinted with her mother’s blue. When Rhaenys is four and Aegon two, their mother gives them the sister they have waited for: Visenya, who will be stern and sorcerous but also uncompromising in her devotion to her family.

Not that Malora has the chance to truly know these things. When Visenya is five, her mother travels to Oldtown to celebrate a sister’s wedding and a brother’s knighthood. Malora is aboard a pleasure skiff two miles out from Battle Isle when the ironborn come out of the west, hidden by the setting sun, and set upon the city like ravenous wolves. Her body is not found until the attack is over and beach combers begin to search for the lost.

Rhaegar puts the Iron Islands to the torch. No boy over the age of ten is left alive, and no building greater than two rooms is left standing. Two dozen cadet branches of the West, the Riverlands, and the North are founded as lesser sons marry sullied ladies or sullen widows. Asha Greyjoy, the kraken’s sole surviving child, is married at ten to a twenty-year-old son of the Hightower.

Ten years later, she and her husband (and their three Hightower children, grudgingly born) attend the ceremony in King’s Landing where Aegon marries both his sisters, just as his namesake. If they truly do carry the spirits of the Conqueror and his sisters, they have no memory of their previous lives, and have a tighter family bond than before.

In four years, when winter flies on white wings and Rhaegar’s body turns to ash as stone turns to dragons, the names of their mounts are Balerion and Vhagar and Meraxes.

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this work, you can check out my ASOIAF sideblog at worldsoficeandfire.tumblr.com


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